Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Engagement with readers, your soon-to-be
readers, is key. It’s essential to have some semblance of an organic
footprint (via social media, writing and publishing pieces, etc.), many
months—no fewer than eight to twelve—in advance of your book’s
publication date.

Semblance of an organic footprint. So lovely.

From a piece on Lithub in which publicists offer advice to the hapless author. (Moral: Never publish a book.)

Tuesday, April 25, 2017

Just how much is school going to cost? It sounds straightforward enough.

...

Every
university applies outside scholarships their own way. Some have a
policy that’s favorable to the student where they create financial aid
packages without factoring in outside scholarships. If you attend such a
university, you could end up like this student
who graduated with $16,000 left over from scholarships, which the
university paid out to her after she finished school. It makes for a
juicy story, but one you won’t hear too often.

Far more common is that the university will use your outside scholarships to reduce your aid package.

Terrific piece on financial aid by Melissa Mesku at the Billfold. It would be fatally easy to quote the whole thing, but it's here.

Monday, April 24, 2017

If you’ve ever granted permission for a service to use your Twitter, Facebook, or Google account, you’ve used OAuth.

This was a radical improvement. It’s easier for users, taking a
couple of clicks to authorize accounts, and passwords are never sent
insecurely or stored by services who shouldn’t have them. And developers
never have to worry about storing or transmitting private passwords.

But this convenience creates a new risk. It’s training people not to care.
It’s so simple and pervasive that even savvy users have no issue letting dozens of new services access their various accounts.

Wha-?

Seriously?

This is from a piece by Andy Baid on Wired from way back in 2012, which I have come across, late in the day, thanks to a tweet by Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror. (All right, not just of Coding Horror; Atwood is probably, actually, more famous for teaming up with Joel Spolsky to launch Stack Overflow. The blog did come first, and his Twitter handle is @CodingHorror, Moving right along...)

I'm completely baffled by this. "Even savvy users?'

Baid goes (went?) on to talk about the large number of apps to which he has granted access to, among others, his gmail account, and to mention other savvy users (including Anil Dash, now CEO of Foggbugz) who have done the same.

Sunday, April 23, 2017

“The Vector Wars” as we have started calling them have been raging for
29 years. They will, no doubt, continue to rage for years to come. The
demise of FreeHand left a large hole in the market that despite Adobe’s
efforts, Illustrator has not been able to fill. Though it should be
mentioned that even today, in 2016, FreeHand is still available for
purchase at Adobe.com and Adobe still provides technical and customer
support, even if they are not updating the code (Note: FreeHand is not
compatible with the most recent versions of Mac OS X). This is, we
believe, to their credit and rather unprecedented in the software
industry to continue to sell and provide support, if not updates for an
application that was at end-of-life before Adobe acquired it and has
been frozen for nine years.

Iconfinder on Affinity Designer (which I discovered because Edward Tufte was asking on Twitter about Affinity Photo) - as part of a comparison of AD, Adobe Illustrator, and Sketch.

A reader who has recently moved to Berlin came to dinner and asked why there was not much on the blog lately. I tend to think "writers are fucked" has limited appeal as a recurring theme.

My Middle Eastern edition of CS Studio (from the days before Adobe moved to a subscription business model) has gone missing, and was last installed on a laptop that is dead, and if I were to find it I'm guessing it would not be compatible with the latest version of OS X. The same is true of the version of Dreamweaver with which I cobbled together my website (which I can now update by wrangling with raw HTML in Textwrangler, which has, however, been rendered obsolete and replaced by a text editor that does not support my current version of OS X).

This is all stupid and boring. I gather Affinity Designer doesn't currently support RTL (right-to-left) text, so it's not the perfect replacement for my CS Studio ME. It does support Japanese. It's available for €49, so it is, at least, affordable even for a writer who spent months fighting off eviction rather than finishing a book. The review of Affinity Designer here.

Friday, April 21, 2017

After the settlement failed, Clancy told me that at Google “there was just this air let out of the balloon.” Despite eventually winning Authors Guild v. Google,
and having the courts declare that displaying snippets of copyrighted
books was fair use, the company all but shut down its scanning
operation.

It was strange to me, the idea that somewhere at Google
there is a database containing 25-million books and nobody is allowed
to read them. It’s like that scene at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie where they put the Ark of the Covenant back on a shelf somewhere, lost in the chaos of a vast warehouse. It’s there. The books are there.
People have been trying to build a library like this for ages—to do so,
they’ve said, would be to erect one of the great humanitarian artifacts
of all time—and here we’ve done the work to make it real and we were
about to give it to the world and now, instead, it’s 50 or 60 petabytes
on disk, and the only people who can see it are half a dozen engineers
on the project who happen to have access because they’re the ones
responsible for locking it up.

Wednesday, April 19, 2017

What can you say about the movement towards writing in a
regional dialect, rather than in Modern Standard Arabic? Is it very
common, and has it affected the audience or marketability of the texts
in question? What about logistical issues, like accurately representing a
spoken dialect in the Arabic alphabet given the presence of
non-standard phonemes?

This is such a meaty question! We could do a whole interview on this topic. I'll try to hit some of the highlights.

[Children's
literature] is a thorny issue. Some authors want to write picture books
in spoken dialect—and some have, like Sonia Nimr—but publishers tend to
be very opposed, as they want to be able to sell into multiple markets
and submit to prizes. Unfortunately, this even goes for dialogue. I
loved Rania Amin's Screams Behind Doors, which won the Etisalat Prize
for best YA novel last November, but it felt weird to have these girls
speaking to each other in Modern Standard Arabic. Rania told me she'd
written the dialogue in Egyptian, but the publisher “fixed” it, worried
they couldn't otherwise submit to prizes and suchlike. A bit galling.

Burger’s second novel, Die künstliche Mutter, is significantly
more autobiographical than one might suppose, given its fantastic
setting. In this glum but sardonic account of a specialist in German
Literature and Glaciology, Burger took up the theme of his own
psychosomatic affliction, his “genital migraines,” as the protagonist
terms them. The book takes place in an otherworldly institution where
patients, lying on beds in tunnels carved in a massif, absorbing the
heat and moisture, are subjected to a battery of bizarre therapeutic
measures. To devise his hero’s elaborate medical history, Burger
devoured reams of psychiatric literature and even took a cure himself
near Bad Gastein, in Austria, where guests rest in underground caves to
enjoy the allegedly salubrious effects of the area’s high radon
concentration.

Uwe Schütte (translated by Adrian Nathan West) on Hermann Burger. This sounds amazing, I thought, and would have wondered why I had never heard of Burger if Schütte had not helpfully explained:

Hermann Burger (Menziken, 1942) is one of the truly great authors of the
German language: a writer of consummate control and range, with a
singular and haunting worldview. Yet it is not surprising that he fell
into obscurity after his death, from an overdose of barbiturates at age
forty-six. He shares this fate with many of the most august names from
the peripheries of German-language literature who, never managing to
escape from the ghetto of Austrian or Swiss publishing, either gave up
in exhaustion, or went on writing and were forgotten nonetheless.

I have not yet renewed my membership of the Staatsbibliothek, but perhaps the Gedenkbibliothek will have Burger even if he is only on the periphery of German-language literature.

Secondhand Sales

The Last Samurai was published in 2000 by Talk Miramax Books. First Talk went under, then Harvey Weinstein split from Disney and Miramax Books handed its books over to Hyperion, then Hyperion dwindled and handed the books back to Miramax who were not, in fact, interested in publishing books.

For a decade of the Miramax Wars readers faced a dilemma. They sometimes want to buy copies of The Last Samurai for friends. It was tempting to buy the book "As New" for $1.70 + $3.99 postage rather than for $14.95 with free shipping in an order of $20 or more, especially if there were many, many friends. The author got nothing on a secondhand sale -- but then, the author would get only $1.12 on the new book. To send the author $1.12 the reader would have to pay an extra $9.24. That's a pretty expensive goodwill gesture.

Goodwill doesn't have to cost that much. PayPal takes 30 cents + 3% on each transaction; if you send the author $1.50 by PayPal she will get $1.15. Many readers sportingly sent a donation - some were insanely generous, all went far beyond the call of duty.

New Directions has now reissued The Last Samurai, so if you want a new copy (or an e-book) you can easily get one. For those who find $0.01+$3.99p&p compelling --we're always grateful for the kindness of strangers.

i+e

John Chris Jones' The Internet and Everyone can be bought for £10: write to jcj AT publicwriting.netJCJ's website has a selection of reviews of this pioneering book.

Berlin

Linguistics

Greek, Latin

RhapsodesSociety for the Oral Reading of Greek and Latin: has recordings of Homer, Pindar, many others.

PerseusExtensive body of Greek and Latin texts in the original languages and in translation; offers ability to click on a word for a definition, grammatical information. Also has lexica, grammars, various other resources. NB: the texts are generally editions that are out of copyright rather than modern versions, so the reader is for the most part offered texts reflecting the state of scholarship at the end of the 19th century. The texts also have no apparatus criticus. So it is a useful resource, but one to be used with caution.